The Beautiful DIY Rebar Art That Still Decorates Ex-Socialist Buildings

If you happen to be wandering the countryside walking the streets of ex-socialist towns and villages in Central or Eastern Europe, you may notice a similar decor on houses built in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. What you’re witnessing is DIY rebar art in its finest form.

Just like the case of the cabins beside Tisza River, we can admire how creative and imaginative people can be when they lack proper building materials. So what if you only have reinforcing bar, a.k.a rebar, to decorate your home? You use what you’ve got: cheap rusty rods of steel that you can curve and flex and weld into anything you want.

I often photograph these amateur, awkward, clumsy yet catching pieces of art, but when I came across a great Tumblr blog called Rebar/Pattern I realised I’m not the only one who loves these rural designs.

Krisztián, editor of the Rebar/Pattern blog, writes:

A rebar (short for reinforcing bar), is commonly used as a tensioning device in reinforced concrete. Besides its functional purpose, it was used for metal mural works of the pseudo-socialistic era. These works, with their false optimistic scenes, decorated firewalls of buildings. Also, the well known home made objects of that era, like flower-racks, window grids, and fence ornaments used this material. These objects were typical examples of the DIY diversity in the socialist lack-economy.

Here comes a set of fine rebar art, based on my collection and the awesome work of Rebar/Pattern. And if you know similar pieces of decoration somewhere around you, please show us: post a photo of it in the comments. Rebar/Patter also eagerly accepts submissions of steel drawings from any post socialist country.